Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/631

Rh after strenuous effort to delay the passage of an ordinance of separate State secession, he yielded when the act was passed and gave his entire energies to maintain the Confederacy. His objections were to the expediency of immediate secession and not to the right of his State to secede.

The convention wisely chose him as a delegate to the Provisional Congress which had been appointed to assemble at Montgomery, by which body he was unanimously chosen Vice-President of the Confederate States, an office which constituted him the President of the Confederate Senate. His talents and commanding influence throughout the South caused his services to be put to immediate use, not only in assisting in the organization of the Confederate government, but in the general effort to induce all Southern States to join those which had already seceded. On this account he was commissioned to treat with Virginia on behalf of the Confederacy and succeeded in gaining that valuable State before its ordinance of secession had been formally ratified by the people. In the formation of the Confederate Constitution his statesmanship and profound acquaintance with the principles of government were found to be of great value. That great instrument was an improvement, in his opinion, on the Constitution of the United States, receiving his warm commendation although some features which he had urged were not adopted. He says of the supreme charter of the new republic, &quot;The whole document utterly negatives the idea which so many have been active in endeavoring to put in the enduring form of history, that the convention at Montgomery was nothing but a set of ’conspirators’ whose object was the overthrow of the principles of the Constitution of the United States, and the erection of a great ’slave oligarchy’ instead of the free institutions thereby secured and guaranteed. This work of the Montgomery convention, with that of the Constitution for a provisional government, will ever re-